Regular Sized Data

This is a quick post to highlight a very niche tool I made. You can see the full details here, but the short story is that I created a PowerShell script to automate part of the formatting required to submit data to the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. So, if you happen to work at one of the ~130 institutions that has to do this, check it out!

I did a post a couple weeks ago on the basics of indexes in SQL Server. One thing that I mentioned in passing is that if you create a clustered index on a column (or columns) with duplicate values, SQL Server will “uniqueify” the columns. This is cashed out in terms of a 4 byte value being attached to each duplicate item, but what does that even mean? What does it look like in SQL Server? How can you know if a value has been uniqueified? [Read More]

If you’re looking at PL/SQL code long enough, you’ll eventually run into a function or procedure that is completely foreign to you. You’ve never seen it before, you have no idea what it does, and you have no idea where the code for the function or procedure is. Often in Oracle databases, functions and procedures are grouped together in packages, so you cannot just use SQL Developer’s sidebar to browse through the functions and procedures. [Read More]

Note: I wrote most of this post over a year ago, but I wanted to revisit it and put it with the rest of my SQL posts. This post briefly covers the basics of what indexes in SQL are, specifically in the context of SQL Server. It’s at a very general level, and we won’t go into the thorny details of indexing strategies (at least this time). [Read More]

It seems like half of the discussion about SQL on the internet is about resources for learning SQL. Many of the frequent suggestions are ones that came out after I learned the basics, and so I haven’t used them. I want to take a moment to highlight three free internet resources that were vital in my SQL development. [Read More]

This post is inspired by my experience with finding SQL Server databases that were started up and never given a second thought. Since the applications these databases support have been running well enough, there’s been no need for a DBA, right? This is a testament to the ease of use and reliability of SQL Server, but it’s also kind of like buying a new car and then driving it everyday without ever giving a thought to maintaining the car; it’ll work for awhile (maybe a long time!), but it’ll come back to bite you eventually. [Read More]

A couple months ago, I wrote a post on how to generate random data in SQL Server. At the end of the post, I promised to revisit the topic but in the context of Oracle, rather than SQL Server. As it turns out Oracle provides a built-in function that makes this task essentially trivial. [Read More]